The president and his allies portray 2020 as a time when Democrats stole the election and prosecuted him based on no evidence.
This is the first of three posts.
Naturally, President Trump has now added a Truth Social post to the theatrical outrage triggered by Senator Chuck Grassley’s publication of an FBI document related to the January 6 investigation into President Trump’s attempt to reverse the 2020 election. It is a document everyone should have known existed: it was required to approve the opening of the investigation. We have known for nearly four years not only that the investigation was opened but that it resulted in Trump’s indictment.
I’ll come to that in the next post. First, to repeat what I have stressed in discussions with Rich on the podcast, there are two things going on here.
First, the top priority of the Trump Justice Department, with help from other administration components and Trump allies on Capitol Hill, is to craft a revisionist history of the scandal arising from Trump’s attempt to undo his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. This principally involves inculcating the syllogism that, because some Democratic lawfare efforts against Trump were bogus (e.g., the Alvin Bragg and Letitia James cases in New York), all Democratic-led investigations of Trump must have been bogus. The main targets of this revisionist history are the two federal investigations — the J6 and the Mar-a-Lago documents cases — that were manifestly based on significant misconduct and abuses of power.
To be clear, there are separate considerations about whether those federal cases should have been brought as criminal prosecutions and whether Biden DOJ special counsel Jack Smith abused his power by patently timing his prosecutorial actions to influence the 2024 election, in violation of Justice Department rules. But let’s say one concludes, as I do, that (1) the J6 prosecution and Mar-a-Lago cases should not have been brought (because other governmental concerns outweighed seeking judgments of criminal conviction based on the underlying misconduct), and (2) Smith improperly (in violation of DOJ rules) attempted to influence the election by trying to rush complex cases to trial before November. Those conclusions do not change the fact that the underlying misconduct Smith was probing was entirely worthy of being investigated.
Second, because the Trump administration and its allies, such as Senator Grassley, are contributing to the historical revisionism by releasing previously undisclosed documents, the paper trail is now catching up to things we have already known about for years. This is not changed by the breathless claims, accompanying each document publication, that “new revelations” somehow prove things Trump has been saying all along about how it was Democrats who tried to steal the 2020 election and succeeded in doing so.
The information is not new. And let’s assume you believe, as I do, that Democrats took advantage of the Covid pandemic to relax state election security laws and that the Biden campaign and its allies in and out of government schemed to suppress information potentially harmful to Biden (e.g., the Hunter Biden laptop story and Biden’s corrupt influence-peddling). That does not change the fact that President Trump engaged in outrageous abuses of power, to attempt to reverse the result of an election he had lost, by attempting to project the existence of massive, outcome-determining election fraud in what he knew was the absence of evidence.
Now, onto “Arctic Frost.”